Two men loom large for their influence in fostering in me an interest in Wyoming’s natural and cultural history.
My brother and I grew up on a legacy ranch in Carbon County started in 1881 by our Great-Grandfather, I. C. Miller. You might know my brother Rod from his column in this very publication.
I worked at the ranch for my dad Frank for over thirty years, and he was eventually elected to the Wyoming Cowboy Hall of Fame.
From my dad, I gained a deeply held appreciation for the natural world. I went on to study at the University of Wyoming under Dr. George C. Frison, Wyoming’s first National Academy of Sciences scholar. From Frison, I learned how Wyoming’s natural wonders influenced its human past.
Every reader of Cowboy State Daily who ponders our diverse natural environment can marvel at its accomplishments revealed in the stones, sediments, and water that make up our Equality State, almost 100,000 square miles of undulating terrain.
Rugged, mountains knife through floating clouds along the spine of the Continental Divide, winds whistle across wide semi-arid basins, and the sweet fragrance of spring grasses permeates the air above the high plains. The sensory stimulation these traits offer causes us to pause in the mad rush of our hectic lives.
It is the dimensions of this wonderful landscape that delineate the geography of our time on earth, measured horizontally from north to south, east to west, and vertically from the snow-covered crest of Gannett Peak down through accumulated sediments to the bedrock of Steele Shale and Pre-Cambrian Granite.
What beauty this land offers the observer! What fascinating questions it is yet to reveal!
Equally diverse as nature is the human cultural experiences that have unfolded within the state’s boundaries, even before it was a state.
Euromerican exploration, beaver trappers, and homeless emigrants built part of our story, but Wyoming also witnessed at least 13,000 years of human history before that.
Early occupants hunted woolly mammoths with stone tipped spears, built animal corrals thousands of years before cattle arrived, and even fashioned small, eyed-needles from animal bone that rival in size and efficiency the metal implements we know today.
Such archaeological wonders have produced more questions than answers in the century or so we have been studying ancient sites.
When we talk about human history in Wyoming, we are referring to this long chronology of human settlement.
European immigrants may have brought metallurgy, science, and agriculture to the area, but their densest settlements followed well-used transportation corridors to maintain better contact with urban centers back East.
In contrast, many areas off the beaten path in Wyoming were more heavily populated by ancient hunter-gatherer groups than those areas are today.
Think of the Big Horn Medicine Wheel, the multi-layered evidence of human settlement along Medicine Lodge Creek, or the countless bison jumping episodes at the Vore site near Beulah.
Recent immigrants have only been here about two centuries, but the earliest inhabitants survived the vagaries of the environment for 13,000 years using tools made of stone and homes made of hides. Their lives are an equal part of Wyoming history.
Written history and archaeology have a lot in common when it comes to documenting the human experience. They are more symbiotic than we once imagined.
History books bind together pages full of interesting events, each unfolding their own story as the reader passes from the beginning to the end of the tale.
Such documents are carefully protected in secure libraries throughout the state, and they are available to anyone who wants to read them.
Archaeological sites share this characteristic. As I wrote in my memoir A Sometimes Paradise, occupants of these early sites wrote their own stories, not in books, but in the grainy paragraphs of sediment under our feet.
The authors didn’t use cursive script or typewriters but told their tales with stone tools, cold fires, and the bones from the animals they ate.
Many sediments in Wyoming are stratified, one on top of the other, layered like the pages of a history book, and the stories they tell need translation by trained archaeologists.
We in Wyoming should protect these sites as eagerly as we protect our written history books. Laws have been developed that do just that.
We must honor them, because it is just as likely that the next big discovery about the human experience in Wyoming will come not from the dusty page of an old historic tome but will be unearthed from the windblown terrain of our rural landscape.
Let’s protect our entire collective past so future generations will better understand Wyoming.
Mark Miller can be reached at: WestRider51@outlook.com
